BARBOUR, BRIAN FOSTER, M.A. Transferring Cultures Across Imagined Borders: a Look at Quentin Compson and Martin Arrowsmith. (2011) Directed by Dr. Scott Romine. 65 pp. The purpose of this thesis is to examine two of American modernism’s more successful authors (and the unconventional pairing of two of their more recognized characters) in an attempt to provide a new regionalist argument for the rejection of socially created local values when those values are transferred across imagined regional lines. Chapter I presents the argument based on research in American regionalism, American modernism, and criticism of the mass market culture that developed at the turn of the twentieth-century. Chapter II examines William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson and his role as a mobile narrative that moves from the South of Faulkner’s Mississippi in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! to Cambridge, MA through close readings of both novels in conjunction with recent and traditional criticism of both Faulkner and Quentin. Chapter III examines Sinclair Lewis’s Martin Arrowsmith and his role as a mobile narrative that represents a group of politicized American values, and the effects of his travels through different regions within the text of Arrowsmith . The result of this thesis will be to expose a critical approach to modern regionalism that has not been effectively used to its fullest potential in literary scholarship of the past. TRANSFERRING CULTURES ACROSS IMAGINED BORDERS: A LOOK AT QUENTIN COMPSON AND MARTIN ARROWSMITH by Brian Foster Barbour A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Greensboro 2011 Approved by __________________________________ Committee Chair © 2011 Brian Foster Barbour For Dr. Jim Booth “It was you who broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving” ii APPROVAL PAGE This thesis has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ____________________________ Scott Romine Committee Member _____________________________ Mark Rifkin ______________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to say thank you to Drs. Scott Romine & Mark Rifkin for advising me on this project; my wife Ashley (its finally done Sweetness!); Dr. Sara Littlejohn and the UNCG Writing Center; and finally Joe George for those great conversations over that quirky Quentin fella. Thanks. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................1 The New Mass Market .................................................................................1 Regional Consciousness in the Modern American Novel .......................................................................................................11 New England Hegemony ...........................................................................14 II. QUENTINIAN ETHICS ....................................................................................21 Faulkner’ South ..........................................................................................21 Quentin at Harvard: Perceptions of the South in the North as Translated by a Southerner .......................................................27 Da Pape’ .....................................................................................................31 III. PHAGEMAN ......................................................................................................39 Winnemac as America ...............................................................................39 The Significance of the Midwest in Arrowsmith ....................................... 44 Death in a Tropical South ..........................................................................53 IV. CONCLUSION: FAULKNER AND LEWIS AND THE PROBLEM OF THE NEW MASS MARKET ......................................................................................................58 Transferring Cultures Across Imagined Borders ......................................58 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................62 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The New Mass Market In The 42 nd Parallel , John Dos Passos writes “[t]he twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious” (3). Through this passage Dos Passos presents a national identity as a unified vision of “America,” but was there a truly unified national consciousness that would dominate the twentieth century? Within the first four decades of the century, the US witnessed the birth of a mass market culture through radio, motion pictures, and the automobile, all of which conveyed a new knowledge base that promoted a new national singularity: an American-ness. In response to this newly revised national awareness (and realizing the opportunities that this new culture might provide), many of the Modern artists of the period, according to Mark Morrison, “argued vehemently…in favor of a cultural revolution or renaissance…that would sweep away stifling, empty American conventions and replace them with a truly vibrant indigenous culture” (Morrison 13) 1. Writers such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein 1 Daniel Joseph Singal argues that “Modernism should properly be seen as a culture – a constellation of related ideas, beliefs, values, and modes of perception – that came into existence during the mid to late nineteenth century, and that has had a powerful influence on art and thought on both sides of the Atlantic since roughly 1900. Modernization, by contrast, denotes a process of social and economic development, involving the rise of industry, technology, urbanization, and bureaucratic institutions, that can be traced back as far as the seventeenth century. The relationship between these two important historical phenomena is exceedingly complex, with Modernism arising in part as a counter response to the triumph of modernization, especially its norms of rationally and efficiency, in nineteenth- century Europe and America. “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly : 39.1 (1987) 7. 1 sought the creation of a new art form centered on what Pound called the “mongrel” nature of America: its unique diversity through its evolving population and constant state of flux (Morrison 15). Pound’s Renaissance model, outlined in his “Patria Mia” essay from 1912 2, insisted on a rededication to the arts in America. He complains that the country lacks what he calls “capital” in the arts, and insisted that America was ripe for a re-discovery of literature and poetry. He argued that there was “more artistic impulse in America than in any country in Europe” and regarded America as the “great rich, Western province which has sent one or two notable artists to the Eastern capital…the double city of London and Paris” (Pound 112, 114). He continues by noting America’s reluctance to teach artists true interpretation in various forms of art, and points to the nation’s great architectural achievements as proof that the U.S. was indeed ready for a renaissance that would give American artists their first real stake in western expression. Pound’s model was a vision of a heterogeneous conglomeration of the sub-cultures that made up America, forming a new uniquely American art form that would separate itself from Europe and its artistically rich heritage. However, while Pound’s goal was to take the numerous styles of American art and combine them into a singular mosaic that would represent the diversity of the culture, the texts of some authors who remained stateside worked to solve the basic question of “what is America?” They explored how local cultures would translate either against the emerging ideal of a homogenous national culture or if the local cultures would survive 2 In the book Ezra Pound: Selected Prose , editor William Cookson notes that the essay originally appeared as installments in The New Age between September and November, 1912. Pound would address the idea of a “renaissance” again in 1915 with three more articles for Poetry entitled “The Renaissance I: The Palette,” “The Renaissance II,” and “The Renaissance III” from issues 5.5 (227-234), 5.6 (283-287) and 6.2 (84-91) respectively. 2 the institution of a rapidly developing mass market. As Rita Barnard observes, “it was certainly an age of new technologies and lifestyles, of the automobile, the movies, the flappers, and the cynical ‘Lost Generation,’ but it was also a time when many Americans tried to turn the clock back from the ideas and the progressive spirit of the pre-war years” as it became “a time when insecurity imposed a certain conformity and…a homegrown idea of ‘culture’ thrived” (Modern 44) 3. In his book Culture as History, Warren Susman articulates what writers of the period were grappling with as the nation attempted to convert itself from a fragmented group of imagined regions into a single unified entity: “Thus the great fear that runs through much of the writing of the 1920s and 1930s is whether any great industrial and democratic mass society can maintain a significant level of civilization, and whether mass education and mass communication will allow any civilization to survive” (Susman, 107). The anxiety Susman alludes